Just when I
thought that I’d scoured the internet clean of every recording of Guillermina
Motta that could possibly be found, I come across an on-line auction for this absolute
gem of a 45, “A Omar Kheyyam”, published by Discos Vergara SA (Barcelona), a
glorious and curious paean to wine dedicated to the famous 11th century
Persian scientist, mathematician and philosopher. This record is pure pop poetry.

The year of
publication, 1969, struck my curiosity since it antedates all my other Motta
records in which she sings in Spanish.
If this is indeed one of her first forays into the Castilian tongue then
Khayyam’s mystique in Western consciousness could provide some portion of insight into the philosophical
intentions behind Motta’s transition out of Nova Cançó’s Catalan-only language practices at the height of the movement’s
popularity.

She keeps
in line with the traditional Western interpretation by English writer Edward FitzGerald of
Khayyam as a rebellious, agnostic hedonist, looking to his verses on wine and
the transience of life, singing, “Sin
vino soy un cuerpo / Con vino soy un cuerpo con un alma” (Without wine, I’m a
body / With wine, I’m a body with a soul).
FitzGerald’s was actually a translation of a 15th century version of
Khayyam’s 11th century Rubaiyat, and followed a much looser approach
than modern standards of practice would allow, but has been defended by some
throughout the 20th and 21st centuries for its artistic
merit, most notably by Jorge Luis Borges, whose father translated FitzGerald’s
version into Spanish.

FitzGerald's rendition merges and consolidates stanzas to suit his needs whilst maintaining the AABA rhyme scheme and Iambic pentameter as its bedrock. Each self-contained quatrain realises its own arc and resolution through the dynamics and tension created between its two couplets. In a structurally parallel fashion, Motta's composition creates dynamics and tension by having the verse and refrain interact as distinct couplets of a single quatrain. Each verse-refrain pair is bound together by the constant baseline 6⁄8 time signature throughout, which is made peculiar in that the verse carries three measures per phrase (or line of lyrics) only to shift to two measures per phrase at the refrain, resulting in a lot of dynamic poetic content getting shoehorned into what seems a simple pop formula.

With regards to Borges's defence, he actually ended up writing a short piece in which the figures of Khayyam and FitzGerald
amalgamate to form a wholly new entity, “an extraordinary poet unlike either
of the two”. The loose adaptation that
is produced takes on metaphysical attributes that secure Khayyam “a place among
the greatest poets of England”. The
work’s constant transmogrification in Western culture is quite subversive that way; likewise, in “Con vino
soy”, in the context of Francoist Spain, the opportunity presents itself for
Motta, a Catalan singer, to introduce otherness to the greater homogeneous
society of the time –a society that just a year prior had removed Motta’s
kindred spirit Joan Manuel Serrat from representing Spain at the Eurovision
Song Contest for making an effort to sing the country’s entry in Catalan
instead of Castilian—working within the framework of accessibility whilst
introducing non-native elements into the mix in order to create something new,
something much in keeping with the overall essence of the New Song protest
movements of the decade.